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The link between words and things having been established, the study of language, and of Sanskrit in particular, enables one to reach conclusions about the world. Bhartṛhari uses the words of Patañjali, who says in his Mahabhasya: "We accept the word as authority. What the word says is authoritative for us."38 Exactly the same phrase can be found in the Sabara Bhasya,39 but Bhartṛhari clearly gives it a wider interpretation. His Väkyapadiya observes: "People accept the word as authority; they are followed (in this] by the religious and scientific treatises (Sástra)."40
We return to Bhartṛhari's acceptance of the sentence as the primary linguistic unit. This implies that the phenomenal world corresponds to statements, first of all Vedic statements. This explains that, according to Bhartṛhari, injunctions and other rules are somehow built into the phenomenal world. Individual words do not constitute injunctions, or Sastras, or rules of behavior for animals and humans. And it is through its sentences that the Veda becomes what it is. If the world is created, or organized, in accordance with the Veda, Vedic sentences must be meant, not just individual Vedic words.
I hope that what I have said so far shows the extent to which Bharthari was both a philosopher who dealt with current problems and challenges and a traditionalist. In a fact, his writings are quite specific about his respect for tradition. We read here, for example: "Without tradition, logic cannot establish virtue (dharma); even the knowledge of seers derives from tradition."41 And again: "He who bases himself on tradition... is not hindered by logical arguments."42 His grammatical writing rep-. resents a change of attitude which Madhav Deshpande (1998, p. 20), from the University of Michigan, does not hesitate to characterize as a paradigm shift. Unlike his main predecessors, who lived a number of centuries earlier, with Bhartṛhari "an entirely new tone has set in. There is a strong feeling that the current times are decadent, and that there are no truly authoritative persons around. Grammarians in this decadent period must look back to the golden age of the great ancient grammarians and seek authority in their statements."
One might be tempted to accuse Bhartṛhari of using the philosophical debate of his time to try to gain respectability for the Vedic tradition to which he belonged, ( and one might very well be right in this. Let us not forget that philosophical debate! during the first half of the first millennium was almost totally confined to Nyaya,: Vaiseşika, Samkhya, and a number of Buddhist schools. None of these schools had any direct link with the Vedic textual corpus or with its ritual traditions. The oppo sition of Samkhya to the Vedic tradition is testified to by texts from various periods, some as old as the Mahabharata, others much younger.43 And the early texts of Nyaya and Vaiseṣika-although later categorized as orthodox, that is, "Vedic"show little evidence of having any particular link with Vedic texts and rites:44 the evidence we have points rather to a link with the worship of Śiva.45
The most orthodox schools of philosophy are, of course, Pürva- and UttaraMimāmsă. The former does not really join the philosophical debate until Kumārila Bhatta, one or two centuries after Bhartrhari. The latter, better known by the name Vedanta (or Vedantism), is perspicuous by its absence in listings of philosophical
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schools during this early period. This does not necessarily mean that there were no Vedantins during the early centuries of the first millennium, but it does strongly suggest that they did not yet participate in the philosophical debate, that they did not yet expose, and improve, their positions in the light of criticism received (and perhaps even solicited) from others. Bhartṛhari may have been one of the first truly "Vedic" philosophers. He joined the philosophical debate, took up the challenges that occupied the other thinkers of his time, and constructed a system that gave a place of honor to the Veda and to the way of life it represented to its followers. Indeed, Bhartṛhari maintains that the world has been created in accordance with the Veda, including the Vedic injunctions. Correct Brahmanical behavior is therefore anchored in the nature of the world itself, no less than the song of the cuckoo.
Bhartṛhari did not take his task lightly. In his effort to find a place for the Veda in the philosophical debate of his time, he read everything he could lay his hands on, and borrowed elements from practically all his sources (without acknowledgments, unfortunately). Vaiśeşika elements are particularly abundant, and Buddhist elements are important, but scholars have also traced elements from Samkhya and even from Jainism in Bhartṛhari's work. No doubt from Buddhist sources Bhartṛhari took the idea that the phenomenal world is not ultimately real. This allowed him to postulate a highest reality, which on one occasion he calls Brahman. He might in this way have claimed highest reality for the Vedic tradition and left ordinary reality (which is ultimately unreal) to the various philosophical schools that existed in his day. But he did not do so. He accepts the relative validity of those schools of thought in the realm of the phenomenal world (this is his perspectivism), but adds an important element of his own: phenomenal reality is determined by the Veda. The Veda is its creator for organizer), and this means, in the end, that only the Vedic Brahmins know its nature and are really in a position to influence it. Seen in this way, Bharthari's ideas on language and reality, and on the relationship between these two, are really the result of a Brahmanical twist given to ideas that had been around for a while.
Notes
This essay, initially foreseen to be a lecture only, draws heavily on material which I have published elsewhere and that is brought together in my article "Sanskrit and Reality: The Buddhist Contribution" (Bronkhorst 1996b).
In the Notes, the abbreviation Vkp is used for the Wilhelm Rau edition of the Vakyapadiya by Bhartṛhari. See Rau 1977 in the References section below. WI refers to the Word Index to the Prasastapadabhäşya by Johannes Bronkhorst and Yves Ramseier (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1994).
-The results of this investigation have now come out in a small monograph, Langage et réalité. See Bronkhorst 1999 below. 2-Mülamadhyamakakärikā 7.17: yadi kaścid anutpanno bhavaḥ samvidyate kvacit/ utpadyeta sa kim tasmin bhave utpadyate 'sati (Nagarjuna 1977).
Johannes Bronkhorst
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